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In a word... Citadel. (Disclaimer: I am a developer on this project, and yes, I'm flogging it here.) Contacts, calendars, notes, documents, email, etc etc. One single installation without a zillion dependencies.

Verizon tried this already in 2003. It was a pretty cool idea, because they already had the phone booth real estate, and the presence of telephones at each one meant that they could use their existing DSL infrastructure for backhaul.

Fast forward to 2012. Wifi is in far greater demand now than it was nine years ago, now that everyone's got tablets and other devices. Perhaps it is an idea whose time has come. However there will be stiff competition, particularly from cable companies in suburban areas where the wires are overhead. Many cable companies are now deploying thousands of devices that look like this on the wires. They're Wi-Fi hot spots with built in cable modems. Once the density gets high enough, subscribers are likely to find one in nearly every public place they find themselves in.

Windows 8 will be a trainwreck. Too many changes for most users. The issue is windows 9 (whatever that will look like).

And everyone in Microsoft land will be so delighted that Windows 9 sucks just a bit less than Windows 8, that they won't mind the fact that the "Windows 9 Certified" program will prohibit OEM's from allowing the user to disable UEFI Secure Boot.

Because that's not what Microsoft said. They said that Windows 8 certification on x86 will allow disabling UEFI (for now at least), and that Windows 8 certification on ARM requires complete Microsoft-only lockdown. It is expected that after a few years of the industry getting accustomed to Secure Boot, they will tighten the screws, and Windows 9 certification on x86 will also require Microsoft-only lockdown.

Their goal is for computers to be like smartphones, where the only operating system you are permitted to run is the one that shipped with the device.

I find this statement, considering that it came from the UN, to be somewhat suspicious. Do they really want to protect all freedom of expression? Would the UN continue to champion my freedom of speech if I blasphemed the false prophet muhammad? Or is this just one more case of the UN trying to make an Internet power grab without thinking things through?

Let the takedown happen. It would be better if only smart people knew how to build their MP3 collection from YouTube, using youtube-dl and similar tools. The presence of web sites that allow anyone to do it makes the RIAA upset, and they'll hyperbribe government officials to outlaw computers that don't UEFI Secure Boot to a Trusted(tm) Microsoft(R) Operating System that only allows BingMusic(tm) to be played through TrustedEverything(tm) audio and video channels.

And so it is with this article. Must be a slow news day, or perhaps the slashdot editors are desperate for a few extra clicks, and they knew all the paid Microsoft shills and OSX fanbois would dutifully come out and talk about how much teh Linux desktop sux0rs.

The Linux desktop is doing just fine, thank you. Innumerable satisfied users use it every day to get things done. So quit your whining.

From a quick read of this, it sounds like Canonical is basically trying to build a signed chain loader that will make a transition from a Microsoft-signed boot environment to a libre boot environment. Seems to me as if this will be useful not just for Ubuntu, but for pretty much anyone who wants to boot Linux on a Microsoft-encumbered computer.

If that's the case, we'll eventually start to see Debian, Mint, etc. distributions that make use of the Ubuntu boot loader to get the system up and running.

Clearly the decline of RIM is at the hands of Microsoft, whose Innovative(tm) Windows Phone brings consumers all of the Innovative(tm) features they've been looking for; once they had a taste of Innovative(tm) Windows Phone(tm) there was no further demand for Blackberry.

It is rumored that Apple and Google also have products in this space but they are irrelevant.

I'd buy it. The idea of my mobile phone being merely one more extension hanging off the Asterisk system I have installed at home is VERY appealing. Yes, I know, there are all sorts of edge cases (home phone is down, there's an emergency, blah blah blah) and Slashbots love to be stupidly pedantic about edge cases, but by and large this is the kind of thing a lot of people want -- an "extremely cordless phone" that is part of the voice plan (and phone number) they already have. Bring it on.

So the malware guys found a bunch of unpatched DSL modems with a vulnerability that allowed the resolver to be reconfigured remotely, and pointed it towards the "bad" DNS servers.

So why not just go to the "bad" DNS servers, which they now control, find out the IP addresses of the compromised modems, and use the same vulnerability to reconfigure the resolver to point back to "good" DNS servers?

Facebook is a mile wide but an inch deep. It's basically a whiny high school full of drama queens that happens to have half a billion people enrolled. As others have posted here already, Google+ actually delivers some substance. It's where smart people go.

The way I like to say it is: Google+ is where Facebook users go when they grow up.